‘Sunspark’ Interview: Danny Bourque Chats about His Award-Winning Short | Fantasia Fest

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Sunspark is a 3D animated short created completely by Danny Bourque. Danny wrote, directed, animated, produced, and even scored the film, and it recently played at Fantasia Fest 2026.

I had the opportunity to talk to Danny about his background, Sunspark, and what he’s working on next.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

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Valerie Morreale: It’s awesome to get the chance to talk to you! I wanted to start by asking what first drew you to animation, and were you always kind of interested in film?

Danny Bourque: It took a little while for me to end up kind of doing what I’m doing now. In high school, I was put into a dark photography class. Taking those classes and using a film camera, developing my film and aesthetics and contrast, just all those basic things, and I realized I was pretty good at just finding interesting images, and I could compose things very well and quickly.

So after several years of still image photography, I started wondering, well, what kind of stories could I tell if I could put these sequence or could I do video and make a film? From there, I started watching just short films. Between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college, I started filming with basically a VHS camcorder. My first year in college, they had a camera I could rent in the library, so I started using that to make my first real short films. My grandfather was the lead actor in it, and it was all live action. All my first short films were live action, either like narrative-based stories or scripts that I wrote, or short documentaries.

I eventually went to film school for my MFA, and I was still just really doing live action stuff and more documentaries on top of screenplay-based projects. Once I got my first real job, it was a full-time video editing position that became a motion graphics job. That’s kind of how I got into animation through motion graphics, and being able to animate shapes and colors and being able to augment video projects I was doing for like my normal job, and then it’s like, well, I’m pretty good at this too. It’d be cool if I could animate some characters.

My first animated shorts were through After Effects, and I made several very strange animated short films through that method, and then I did a couple in Flash. I did some frame-by-frame animation, and that whole process just really piqued my interest in animation. How much you could do by yourself, even though it takes a while of very focused effort to create. Like you can do it if you just sit down and spend the time and effort. You can kind of make anything.

So that chapter leads to where I am now. I did a bunch of weird 2d animations, and then got more into music production and did music stuff under the artist name Glitch Black for almost 10 years. With this project, with doing the music, I started to experiment with 3d animation. Strangely enough, under Glitch Black, I started doing just experimental 3D animations and renders and looping GIFs and all sorts of different things, and a lot of those ended up becoming background visuals for my live shows that I ended up using. So the music visuals came together, gave me a reason to explore 3D, and I started getting more complex with my 3D animations. Like I have a hoverbike thing going through the desert. I have all sorts of cool little multi-shot scenes that I started putting together. More than just single-shot looping things, just things that were more. And then it’s like, okay, well, I spent a whole bunch of years getting really good at this.

Back in my film school days, I was writing screenplays, making what I would call a film, and it’s like, okay, I think I’ve learned enough. I’m comfortable enough with this process that the parts I don’t know, I’ll figure out with this one big project, and that one big project became Sunspark. I approached the project thinking, you know, I want a story, maybe around 10 minutes, and really anything was possible at first, and I just started thinking, what can I do with robots? I’ve always liked robots. They’re a great mechanism for applying any like all sorts of metaphors and symbolism. Like you can take a robot body part and they don’t feel pain. You can put it back, so you can just do all sorts of things with their body. That was a jumping-off point for the story of Sunspark.

To dial back a little bit, I wanted to ask you about your first short The Adventures of Timmy and Jenny. What would you say was the biggest lesson you learned, and how do you think about animation differently now?

Well, 2D versus 3D. Some things are similar, but also things that are different. Like in 2D, you don’t have to worry as much about lighting because you don’t draw it, and it’s just flat color. There’s also time, and it’s just minutes compared to hours. Like with 2D animation, you can very quickly render that. It’s not having to churn lighting and reflections and refractions and all sorts of things. Without the Render Network Foundation, it would have taken perhaps months but I was lucky to get a grant from them.

Sunspark was written, directed, animated, and scored by you. What was the inspiration for the story, and what made you decide to do every part of the production process?

Yeah, I mean the answer will be that I wanted to make a story that was 3D animated with cool robots, and then if a robot finds another robot and has to trade parts, or then it’s flowers, just all that kind of real. I tweaked things for about a month, but it came together very quickly.

I wanted to ask about your use of music. Each character has their own leitmotif (or short melody) which gives the audience an expectation and hook for their mood or traits. Was that a purposeful choice in your composing?

Yeah, Zapp kind of gets his from the opening of the film and then later when he kind of has this big pivotal moment. Jimbot, as the junkyard owner, has this quirky, weird little theme. I recorded a bunch of clicks and cracks and clangs, and those became part of his recurring melody.

What are your thoughts on the future of the project? Do you know if and when it will be available to watch online or VOD?

Right now, it’s running through several festivals, so it wouldn’t be available until it’s no longer participating in festivals. Maybe September or October 2027; I might start thinking about a distributor to help me figure out what to do next. But until then, it’s festival only.

Got it, let us know once it’s available so we can let Screenagers know where to watch it! Do you have any future projects that you’re willing to tease or shout out, or what are you thinking is next after Sunspark?

You know, my day job is going to festivals for Sunspark, and my next project is called Eye for an Eye for A Nose. It takes place in a world of claymation people, and in this world, people can interchange their faces, like pieces can come out and can slide out. So imagine like a stop-motion character. You know how their faces are molded, but then the face poses can be swapped, like when they’re photographing the stop motion puppet of it. So it’s kind of like that.

I’m hoping to finish it soon so I can submit it to some festivals later this year, so that’s a deadline I’ve set for myself.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today, Danny. And for those reading, we’ll catch you all in the Wasteland.